The invention concerns a high-speed water separator in a steam turbine installation, consisting substantially of a pipe elbow located between an inlet pipe and an outlet pipe, which pipe elbow has a number of spaced hollow deflection vanes with curved profile in its change of direction plane, which have openings on their concave side and whose hollow blade center is connected with an intermediate space surrounding the pipe elbow, which intermediate space is connected to a lower-pressure zone in the installation.
Water separators of this type are used in order to separate water carried along with the steam from a steam pipe. This is important, in particular, in the case of steam turbine installations, in which excessively wet steam in the low pressure part of the turbine can cause severe errosive damage to the turbine blades.
Water separators of the type mentioned at the beginning are known, for example, from Swiss Pat. Nos. 440,330 and 621,490. In these solutions, separated water is sucked out through gaps in the vane trailing edge and/or on the concave side of the vane. This can have the disadvantage that in the case of large occurrences of water locally or at particular time, a part of the water film formed on the deflection vanes can be torn away and drawn into the turbine with the steam flow.